Profile of Blovski

Nullist, the problem is that those six Ostruppen will, on Semois or Kharkov or Kholodny or whatever, be in or near enough to the key buildings when your maxim gets out. At which point your maxim will be useless against them. On a map/bit of the map without any good buildings, the Ostruppen will wait until they have 1cp and a halftrack then trench creep, at which point the maxim won't be very effective.

I kind of expect a unit which you can get a 2:1 ratio of to be cost inefficient against basic infantry. Right now two Ostruppen squads are at least equal to a gren or a conscript squad in a small arms fire scenario and better against snipers, scout cars, MGs (because you can't suppress both of them) or whatever, in addition to having more map presence, letting you occupy twice as many buildings, cap more sectors... and that's without the trenches.

Since Armoured Cars are 25 fuel again, I think they're actually not that big a deal if you also have conscripts + AT nades. If you can trade the M3 for the upgunned AC, that's always a good deal and one scout car won't cover the whole map if there are no fausts.

My general impression is that building hugging makes assault grens waste a lot of time, which is kind of bad if you only have a couple of capping units and expensive as hell grenades. Similarly going either Tier 1 or Tier 2 reasonably early in theory at least should give you an edge against the assault grens. Alternatively, shocks rip them a new one.

I've not played against the assault grens -> T2 build since the patch, and my approach with that doctrine is assault grens/tier 1/shrektrack + tech based on what the Soviet player shows.

Interesting essay - I sort of agree with the problems as presented, for game sizes over 2v2 at least, but I don't really agree with the solution (it seems like it would involve a hell of a lot more balancing problems and headaches than it would resolve, really). I think Soviet side-teching is maybe overpriced at the moment.

That game with Sib you're referring to is kind of not as much about Soviet shock units as you make out - the German player threw away a Tiger and didn't really invest in any practical counter to the snipers, which reasonably enough left him vulnerable to snipers.

Excuse my supposition, but shouldnt Maxims be extremely effective vs Ostruppen builds?

I understand there is a timing problem, but with the halved capping time, if you can just hold out long enough to get them, shouldnt you be able to completely cripple his Osty spam?

From my limited nooby perspective, I think Maxims and MG42s are very underplayed atm, especially Maxims which are so solid in buildings cos a) they turn and fire very quickly b) ost has trouble vs buildings (especially with Osty spam and no RNade).

A single burst is generally enough to suppress now from Maxim.

Im against the full 4-5 Cons AND Gren builds I see anyways.

More experienced players may know better, but Im convinced every build should include atleast one Support team, in almost every case, for both Sov and Ost. 3 Cons/Grens/Ost max, and the 4th a Support team.

If the current meta indeed really, seriously, favors, Con/Gren/Osty spam this much, that should be addressed in someway, because its cutting the whole substantial and extemely interesting, varied and crucial Support element out of the meta and reducing tiering and progression to base infantry directly to t3 armor.

I could see maxims working on a fairly open map. They're also what HelpingHans, who's using a lot of Ostruppen trench creep at the moment, advocates. On a map like Semoskiy the Ostheer player will have 5-7 Ostruppen sat around in buildings by the time a maxim can get out. And then once the Ostruppen hit 1 cp and can trench up your maxims are never going to push them back.

My theory about the current meta is that con spam lets you get an early T-70 which counters gren spam, while gren spam with LMGs counters con spam if you can handle the early T-70 or get a P-IV early enough. So, it's more or less a pair of strategies designed to counter each other. There are definitely other options against these two strats though, so I'm not too fussed by them.

Ostruppen spam is kind of a different beast to those imo, on account of the sheer amount of early capping power, squads to pop in buildings and so on seems to pose a lot of problems for a fast T1 or T2 start and also gives you slightly better map control than and, as Tensai's stats seem to indicate, at least equal firepower to a pure conscript start. Better if used well. It seems to me like going for Ostruppen massively expands the number of strategies a German player can use (really fast HT with muni cache, quick P-grens, quick scout car spam, fast Ostwind with fuel cache, supporting MGs and trench creep, unusually early bunkers on some maps without sacrificing map control) while really limiting the number of options the Soviet player has to counter them.

My thoughts on the change:
Personally I don't think the capping speed was ever the problem with the unit - the biggest balance problem early game is that on a map like Semois you could have an Ostruppen squad in just about every major building within a few minutes and a second squad capping the point it defends, which is going to be the case as long as they persist with the 120mp, 0cp, really fast cooldown paradigm (which it sounded from the balance stream like they wanted to keep). In general it seems like the cost effectiveness of Ostruppen is still seriously good. Additionally, a change to their capping speed seems basically redundant as long as they can build trenches in non-owned territory while capping and then cap from inside the trenches as soon as they get 1cp.

My preferred solution would probably be making them 1cp (and trenches 2, redistribute resources 3 etc.) so they don't fuck up the faction design in the early game and mess up building-heavy maps. Since that's obviously not going to happen, if they were 180mp, 15 reinforce, same stats, normal capping, trenches fixed, they'd still give a big capping power edge but not be quite as cost effective as conscripts or grens (having twice the number of units/potential map presence and identical cost effectiveness just seems too good) unless paired with an officer or entrenched. Or if there was a minute cooldown or so so they'd have to be backup rather than mainline units and building up a force of 6-8 of them with plenty of vet bonuses would take time and good unit preservation. All of those seem like options that'd go some way towards fixing the fundamental problem, while this change seems to kind of hedge between making sure Ostruppen players don't have a major tangible nerf to complain about and having something to hold up as a change.

tl/dr: being able to have twice as many units and also be equally if not more cost effective is OP. That needs to change. I don't really get what the capping change solves.

Answered many of those questions already.... Ugh

That was aimed at Moeser and Appleseed, not you (because they were just saying 'it's fine' without actually engaging). I appreciate your response - so far I've managed against fast halftracks, it's the fast Ostwind that bothers me, and a lot of really good players seem to struggle against it. What do you do if you see the Bartonian Ostruppen backed by snipers, out of interest? That seems really tough to deal with if the Ostheer player's any good.